Novell: A Historic Loss of Market Share in the PC Server Market

Having just got my first job in computer support back in 93 I was fully aware at who the major network players were at the time: Novell, Sun, & IBM with Mac running the graphics sideshow with a decent share. Novell had the server side for the PC market with their servers being used for small database management and file/print server storage. Sun an IBM were competing on the mini-frame and mainframe levels, and SUN had the graphical side all wrapped up with their X Windows variant. That was cool stuff.

Novell with their 3.11 server product had exploded with a full set of tools for companies to integrate their PCs with a server to share files and it was relatively cheap to get running and maintain. The server was so stable for the time that some servers would run years without a reboot. I worked for a company that had one server accidentally walled in by a construction company and it ran for 3 years and no one noticed. They finally found it when it ran out of disk space, and they were going to add more drives to it. But then came Windows NT 4 server.

In my mind NT was a severely buggy system that was proved slower than Novell 3 and 4 at the time (3 was dumped after the security was breached, since it didn't have any it was just a file server). How could Novell lose market share to an inferior product that did not ever get good until it was upgraded to windows 2000 server?? One word: MARKETING. Windows maker Microsoft had such a cash cow in their OFFICE Suite that they had an unlimited budget for marketing Windows NT. It was hard to compete with that plus the Wal-mart tactic of forcing vendors to only sell their NT product and drop Novell or they would pull their Office Product as well (not corroborated but we have all heard those stories) It was the same thing they had done to force Word Perfect out as the market leader position in word processor software.

Novell is still around but most Technicians are not even familiar with their brand, much less the branded products they still sell. I was a Novell guy starting out, I am proud to say, but had to switch to Microsoft support to keep and get jobs. Novell I apologize to you for getting bullied by the BIG GATES WAR MACHINE back in the 90's and I sympathize with you since I loved your products. I appreciate the fact that your products were better in the 90's than Microsoft can make now, can we all say MEMORY LEAK Microsoft Exchange 2007 server everyone? Check out this blog for more Software Failure Stories .